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Fry was not a specific landscape painter nor someone who indulged in depicting the beauty and harmony of what she saw in nature. But she did become particularly noted for her semi-abstract landscapes, involving skies, woods, mountains, winter trees and natural light. As an abstract expressionist she chose to portray her own interior landscape onto the canvas, presenting beauty, emotion and sensitivity.
Being so naturally drawn to nature equally informed her love of music, poetry and literature, and she included theatre to expand her repertoire. Her work could be characterised by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term, “inscapes”. Later Fry would diversify by exploring printmaking and etching at Morley College. This gave her an opportunity to expand and deepen her horizons, using different textures, while consistently retaining her passion for the colours and harmony of the world outside the studio, even as her eyesight deteriorated.
Minne Fry was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, the daughter of Dr Jack Zidel and his artist wife Ray née Feldman. She was educated at Parktown High School, followed by Johannesburg’s Witwatersrand University, where she studied English. On a visit to London the 15-year-old Minne met fellow teenager Lionel Fry, and the two began a lengthy transatlantic correspondence that culminated in their marriage in 1955, when they were both aged 21.
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After moving to London with Lionel, Minne studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, becoming immersed in London’s burgeoning art scene. Already at this stage she used nature as the main trigger for her creative process, beginning by launching her own internal interpretation rather than offering a literal portrayal. However, she was forced to delay her artistic development while raising three children and teaching English and art in primary schools in south-east London. It was not until her mid-forties that Fry re-emerged as an artist and held 16 solo shows in London, Paris and her native Johannesburg.
In the 1980s she opted to explore new artistic media and took up printmaking at Morley College. She gained success with an etching, Winter Evening, which the Daily Telegraph art critic David Cheal chose as a top pick at the Royal Academy’s 2008 Summer Exhibition. Writing in The Guardian, her friend and sometime curator Sharon Newton quoted Cheal as saying at the time: “If I had it on my wall I would, I think, never stop looking at it, never tire of peering into its mysterious, glowing depths.”
The etching that so moved Cheal offers an insight into Fry’s sensitivity. It is a nostalgic glimpse of a swaying tree buffeted by wind against a dull, yellow sky, which nonetheless manages to express hope beyond the gloom.
Among a repertoire of mixed and solo shows, Minne Fry has exhibited at the RA Summer Exhibition and the Royal West of England Academy Autumn Exhibition, as well as the online gallery Eyestorm, her work showing at some 100 exhibitions all over the world.
She became a regular exhibitor with the National Society of Painters, Sculptors and Printmakers and the Morley Printmakers, for which she won the 2017 painting prize and in 2018 an etching award. In her late eighties, despite her declining eyesight, her love of colour and nature remained key to her continuing oeuvre.
Lionel predeceased her in 2021. Minne is survived by their children, Michael, Tessa and Kathy, and grandchildren Zack and Daisy.
Minne Fry: born December 20, 1933. Died November 16, 2025
